The best Asia books

Although a Ming dynasty (1368-1644) epic, Three Kingdoms has contemporary relevance since it involves China’s recurring experience of national unity and national division. This may explain why it is still widely known in China, and also in Korea and Vietnam, which have suffered internal division, and even in Japan, which shares so much culture and history with them. These four nations may be said to constitute Confucian Asia.

Seeing Flowers is a visual feast that gloriously highlights 343 popular gardens and wildflowers. My collaborator Robert Llewellyn’s photographs are undeniably magnificent, but my job was the words. So I strove to really “see” each flower. His daring and unique images gave me the will to try!

My broad approach to “seeing” is what makes this book unique. Yes, I included the botany (distinguishing characteristics), biology (a flower’s relationships with other creatures, insects and more), and useful gardening info—and I made sure to use clear language that anyone could follow and enjoy. 

But the reader will also encounter fascinating tidbits, tales, and lore. Every living thing including flowers has context, history and stories, which I believe are rightfully part of the wide net of exploration and learning.

Nisbett is one of the leaders of the cognitive revolution in psychology. He showed that conscious thought is less capable of solving some kinds of problems than unconscious thought. He showed some of the ways people’s approach to everyday problems in life goes awry and was the first to show that highly general rules of inference can be taught in such a way that they can solve unlimited numbers of problems having very different content. He showed that Eastern and Western thought – and even actual perception – are drastically different. All of this, and the sum of his 50 years of research, are presented in his highly readable book, which includes vignettes from his early life that are entertaining and that helped to prepare him for his career in psychology.

Garlic! Garlic is the Lord Byron of produce, a lusty rogue that charms and seduces you but runs off before dawn, leaving a bad taste in your mouth. Called everything from a rustic cure-all to Russian penicillin, Bronx vanilla, and Italian perfume, garlic has been loved, worshipped, and despised throughout history. This book takes you on a grand tour of its fascinating role in history, medicine, literature, and art; its controversial role in bigotry, mythology, and superstition; and its indispensable contribution to the great cuisines of the world. It includes over 100 garlicky recipes.

Collected stories, anecdotes, and observations are stitched together with facts, research, and loads of laughs, charting the highs and lows of a school in the tiny Middle Eastern country, which is itself struggling with identity, history, and future prospects. Chapters, such as Sex, Violence, Rubbish, Lying and Cheating, Booze deal with aspects of life for a primary school teacher, her colleagues, and for Kuwait's other residents—subjects that explain and illustrate culture and place.

Welcome to the State of Kuwait is about resilience; trying to find sense where no sense exists; discovering fun in small things. It’s about meeting new friends, where sharing challenges strengthen camaraderie and forms a long-lasting bond; where learning to see the funny side is the saviour of mental health.

Through a country-by-country approach, this book provides a detailed analysis of the complexities of reporting from and on the Middle East. Each chapter provides an overview of a country, including the political context, relationships to international politics, and the key elements relating to the place as covered in Anglo-American media. The book explores how the media can be used to serve particular political agendas on both a regional and international level. This book questions how orientalism manifests itself in the coverage and how. 

Finding Myself in Borneo is an honest and buoyant chronicle of a young Canadian man's adventures during 1968-1970, while teaching secondary school as a CUSO volunteer in Sabah, Malaysia (North Borneo). Travel with Neill McKee on his unique journey through vibrant Asian cultures as he learns the craft of teaching, the Malay language, and local customs, and gains many friends in his small community. He climbs the highest peak in Southeast Asia, has a love affair, and makes his first of many documentary films.

He and his American Peace Corps buddy also discover that North Borneo is, indeed, J. R. R. Tolkien's famed Middle-Earth of The Lord of the Rings! The enterprising duo establishes the North Borneo Frodo Society, an organization Tolkien joins. During McKee's second Sabah sojourn, 1973-74, and other return trips, he tells readers what happened to the land and people who touched his life, and he theirs.

At one level this book is about my rail journeys across Europe, Russia, China, and the United States; but at another level, it’s a book about the books that I carried and read on those journeys. Some books are histories, others are novels, but each informed me about the landscapes of my travels. This book is also, in part, a memoir about my father, who when I was writing it, was living out his last years in Princeton, New Jersey. Very often, when we were together and sitting in front of his fireplace, we would recall great journeys that we had made—some together, others separately, but always on the same trains of thought.

What I call “Impresarios with Scenarios” are teachers who make themselves class mobilizers, improvisers, and energizers, setting up self-unfolding learning challenges and adventures – off-beat and unexpected problems, unscripted dramas or role-plays, simulations that might take ten minutes or maybe a whole term – provoking and trusting students to run with them. Illustrated by detailed narratives from my own practice as well as others’, here is a conceptual framework as well as class-planning strategies for “teaching as staging”, in multiple settings and across the disciplines, differing sharply not just from “teaching as telling” but also from the supposedly opposite model of the teacher as facilitator or coach “guiding on the side”. Everyone active, no one on the side!

"Many say I was the best geisha of my generation," writes Mineko Iwasaki. "And yet, it was a life that I found too constricting to continue. And one that I ultimately had to leave." Trained to become a geisha from the age of five, Iwasaki would live among the other women trained in the “art of perfection” in Kyoto's Gion Kobu district. She was loved by kings, princes, military heroes, and wealthy statesmen alike. But even though she became one of the most prized geishas in Japan's history, Iwasaki wanted more: her own life. And by the time she retired at age twenty-nine, Iwasaki was finally on her way toward a new beginning.

Geisha, a Life is her story—at times heartbreaking, always awe-inspiring, and totally true.